Animation Forum West Midlands

Natalie Hinchley: That's so cool!

CR: So yeah, it was a really nice grounding. Also I had a fantastic mentor, a guy called Peter Tyler, a brilliant cinematographer, he's moved up North now but taught me so much about how to think differently around problems, 'how to use gravity as your friend' was probably one of the best tips he ever taught me. Which is quite funny because when we do stop-frame animation, gravity is the one thing we try and fight! I suppose the short answer is that when we started getting work that was outside of our day jobs, we needed to start legitimising it. So it just fell into place really. It was a bit of a joke really – the actual name – in that we seem to spend our lives living at work, so it was practically a second home really. It was a piss take of ourselves basically! When we actually set the studio up, twelve, eighteen months ago now it was nice to come back from Manchester. I'd finished my time working for CITV up there – because I was animating full-time up there – came back here, set the studio up, and it felt a bit like, "Am I the only person who likes playing with dolly's in dark rooms?"

NH: Sounds odd doesn't it!

CR: It does sound odd doesn't it, so I started looking out to find anybody else that was interested, and I saw some of Tilley's films: Monty Milkman and Onions and My Dads Garden Shed, and thought "oh right, who's that?" I saw the name reoccurring and it was really good stuff, and I got in touch through Karol through Definitely Red for the Creative Channel Network. Then I got Ian [Whittle] and Jon [Reynolds] details through Pete McLuskie, and I'd already befriended a couple of animators up in Manchester, Jud and Dale who worked full-time up there. By then we had the core of an animation army I suppose! Or animation platoon I suppose you might call it, we were setting the studio up and wanted a project at the end of the year to aim for, then started kicking a few ideas round and got the Digital Shorts commission. That was the excuse to put the studio to the test really. Time wise it was still trying to fit a quart into a pint-pot as it was like a live action schedule.

NH: I think Screen West Midlands were very honest about that, I think they knew that there were differences between live action and animation, especially because stop frame is the luxury end of animation, it's the most time consuming and expensive way of animating; not that we're foolish or anything! But it's also in my view one of the most exciting ways of doing it, so it was an interesting time schedule but we all managed it.

CR: We did manage it. I think for everybody involved it was incredibly gruelling. We were lucky in that Dan Lawson – the Exec Producer - at Screen WM was incredibly supportive from start to finish and not all productions have that.

NH: I think it was gruelling for everybody linked with everybody involved too; like friends and family.

CR: It has a kind of ripple effect, it's crazy. That's what film making is about, I think we kind of accept that we have to make sacrifices to try and get something that's quality at the end of it, when you're not working with the luxury of a normal budget or workforce to execute something, but you really want to show what can be done.

NH: That's right, because the film is not only a showcase for the studio, being the first film here, but it was also a way for me to produce something that up until that point I had not been able to produce, because I hadn't had the facilities and the people. So it was a great partnership, but with lots of people. It was a massive effort, and everybody really toiled over the film, everybody really felt the same way about it.

CR: Everyone bought into the whole philosophy behind it, the obvious connotations of finding a better way of life than the urban one.

NH: It's such a charming story; it was the kind of film that we both wanted to make for a while. I certainly wanted to make a film appreciated by as many people as possible but using great skills and the most exciting bits of animation, it was a really great story and really beautifully executed.

If you had to sell the Animal Book to someone in a minute, what would you say?

CR: In the way it was made, as far as I can remember, I don't think there has been either a studio or a film of this scale or ambition that has been produced here before. That may sound like I'm blowing our own trumpet a bit, but I can't honestly remember a studio that's had the experience or the willingness, or I suppose 'passion' is a better word because we love doing it, to actually do large scale stop motion animation. So that's why The Animal Book came about, and the reason for The Animal Book was that we wanted to do something that wasn't just animation for the sake of it, there was a story behind it, a tale to tell, and I suppose the pitch for the story is it's about going to where you belong, finding a better life.

NH: Yeah, simple pitch: it's about two sisters who maintain the giant machine that they live in, until one day a mysterious book appears. And from that point, they have really crazy adventures, things happen and they end up discovering some place that they really belong in.

Is there an environmental message to the film?

NH: When we first met – in pubs mostly, as filmmakers do – we had big rants about Birmingham and some elements of this giant city that annoyed us both.

CR: It was mainly urban regeneration in general really, you see the buildings they're already putting up, that are made of this weird, grey PVC panelling, and they're already going manky. They're already looking a bit tired, when will we ever learn not to keep doing that and then tear them down twenty years later and rebuild them…

NH: …In the exact same way.

CR: We find ourselves still working in the same way and living in the same way, and we get so used to doing it, we don't know any better. Which is kind of why in this story, the older sister Polly, has got to that point where she's used to it and maintains the machine as a whole entity, being the city. It's quite telling that they're the only two inhabitants of the thing, as if they've inherited this world. When they wake up, when they open their door in the morning, the machine is starting around them, which is like everyone's subjective view of the city. You get up and the day revolves around your perspective. So in that way, I'm sure there's some kind of weird psycho-analytical point! They're in this box house that's attached like a little wart to this other building, then next to this is a similar house but the front of it is all boarded up. So in that there is a little design statement we put in, as if to say the previous caretakers used to live here, and they're no longer here. It's a very, very subtle thing and you only notice it on a big crane shot that we put into it.

NH: There were certain things that we needed to animate; like the suggestion that it was a continual routine, so there were certain things in there like the clock that gave the impression of time moving on, and the fact it was all based around their route through this particular place. But Chris is completely right, the characters were different in themselves; one's older and the other is slightly younger. And the older sister has already reached the point where she's maintaining the machine, where she has this duty, this thing resting on her shoulders in this way. Whereas the younger one, who is the first one to discover this place, is a bit more flighty, a bit more, "Oh my God, it's boring." She understands that there is something not quite right here, but knows she's meant to be living in it. She's the first one who reaches the point of leaving.

CR: In the way the characters themselves were designed, we created a deliberate design clash between the way the characters look and the actual world that they start off in, as being a little bit non-complimentary, a bit incongruous.

NH: Also, little things like they actually have colour on them, whereas the whole world is very metallic. The fact that they're a very ergonomic, gorgeous shape and everything around them is very metallic and geometric and sharp.

CR: So the basic idea is that the place that they go to is one full of colour and soft. It's rounded and more inviting…

NH: Visually they fit in there.

CR: Yeah, I suppose if you really wanted to analyse it, the difference between the two characters and the book is that the book gives them the option, and it's not necessarily true that the arrival of the book is very sudden. The book could have been flying around this machine for ages, that possibility for them to travel to a different place could have been there but they just weren't aware of it, or not aware of it until this particular point. So we left that kind of ambiguous didn't we? As to whether it had come through the moon portal or just there flying around, biding its time.

NH: They were good fun things to animate, even though gravity is always something that you have to fight against, so the book – having it fly around – was technically something that was interesting to achieve, but it worked really nicely because there were certain ways of telling the story that we were able to do because of the set-up that you've got here.

CR: Yeah, we've deliberately kitted the place [Second Home Studios] out so that it's got all the toys that we like using. Like a decent lighting kit, we've got probably in excess now of £20k's worth of lights which is more than enough to light a reasonably good set, either here or on location. We've got plenty of drapery, blue screen, green screen, black drapery, partition the studio up, motion control capability, rostrum capability. So it's really good because we adopted an old rostrum rig so it's basically a motion control track, which is perfect for the kind of scale of set we're shooting on. We've got model movers and stuff that we can adapt and shoot on Digital SLR's; basically it scaled down the grip and amount of motion control requirements, compared to say the traditional size of rig like a milo.

NH: It meant we could get the camera in places that we wouldn't be able to otherwise.

CR: If we used a 10 digit broadcast, like a Sony, Thompson, Digi Beta or something like that, we'd be fighting the size of the camera all the time…

NH: …and a lot of the shots would have been scuppered. There was a particular one where we had to position the little camera right next to a building, and poked the lens through another section and brought it back out; we wouldn't have stood a hope in hell of doing that with a broadcast camera jobby.

CR: For that we would have used a milo, but there wasn't any need, it worked absolutely fine. The advantage of the Digital SLR's is that we've got 2k cinema HD quality images and even when they were down converted to Digi Beta and they were projected on UGC, it was like "Whoa! That looks really crisp!" So that was a really fun part of it actually; using the digital aspect of it but to such an intense quality it worked a treat. And then for post-producing it, it made it so much easier; FTP it straight upstairs and then straight onto the Mac pro and then onto After Effects and away you go.

Read the second half of this interview here.